Virtual reality provides a heightened sense of immersion and spatial awareness that provides a unique opportunity for designers to perceive and evaluate scale and space. At the same time, traditional sketches and small-size physical models provide tactile feedback that allow designers to create, comprehend, and explore complex geometric relationships.
Through the development of vSpline, a modeling application for virtual reality, we explore the potential for design within a virtual spatial environment to blur the boundaries between digital and physical stages of design, and seek to combine the best of both virtual and analog worlds. By using spline-based closed meshes created directly in three-dimensional space, our software provides the capabilities to design, modify, and save the information in the virtual world and seamlessly convert the data to evaluate the printing of 3D physical models.
We identify and discuss important questions that arise regarding relationships of perception of scale, digital-to-physical domains, and new methods of input and manipulation within a 3D immersive space.